The 1828 presidential election was one of the nastiest in United States political history. Andrew Jackson’s campaign accused the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, of being a pimp and spending the people’s money to fund gambling in the White House. Adams was many things—stiff, dour, pious, the son of a president, an accomplished diplomat—but a betting whoremonger he was not.

The Adams campaign fought back by charging Jackson with numerous criminal acts: He had fought illegal duels that resulted in the death of a prominent man and ignored the pleas of several of his soldiers when they faced execution for desertion. Foreigners had also suffered from his wrath, as Jackson and his army had waged a war of extermination against the southeastern Indians and their British allies in the 1810s. Jackson’s private life was not exempt during the 1828 campaign either. He stole another man’s wife, critics claimed, and brazenly lived with her before she was divorced. He was a “trafficer in human flesh,” buying and selling slaves and turning a blind eye when his overseer stabbed to death one of the slaves at Jackson’s Hermitage plantation. The Adams men warned that voters would regret making a president of this murdering, home-wrecking, slavetrading, southern dictator.

Political protocol dictated that Jackson could not directly counter these attacks, but he did not sit by idly as they came his way. Jackson organized his political network to justify his actions as honorable, and its members offered an aggressive defense. He had fought duels to protect his and his wife’s reputations. He had allowed the execution of his soldiers because to do otherwise invited mutiny and the destruction of his army. He had prosecuted the war against Native Americans and their allies because the United States needed the southeastern lands to secure its borders. Even his marriage to Rachel was honorable. Jackson had saved her from an abusive husband, and they had believed, wrongly it turned out, that her divorce was final before they married. Other accusations, such as the slave-trading charge, were dismissed simply as deliberate attempts to manipulate the truth for political benefit.

In many ways the political arguments used by both presidential campaigns in 1828 centered on Jackson’s southern identity. From the first scholarly treatment of Jackson by James Parton in the early 1860s, however, historians of the Jacksonian period and biographers of Old Hickory himself have consistently portrayed the seventh president as a frontier westerner. Frederick Jackson Turner’s assessment of Jackson as “the very personification” of the American frontier, the “embodiment of the tenacious, vehement, personal West,” summarized this interpretation. “He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas . . . and he grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee,” Turner argued. [1]

Turner was wrong. While the Waxhaws region into which Jackson was born was considered the backcountry, it was closely tied to the lowcountry region of Charleston, not the trans-Appalachian West. The American Revolution unified backcountry and lowcountry South Carolinians even more, creating a distinct American identity even as the war tore apart many families, including Jackson’s. Turner was also mistaken in his claim that Jackson “grew up” on the Tennessee frontier. There is no question that Jackson faced the frontier and its many challenges, but the core of his identity had already been formed by the time the twenty-one-year-old lawyer arrived in Nashville in October 1788.

Historical scholarship has either ignored or minimized the reality that Jackson possessed all of the characteristics attributed to his western identity—his independence, violent temper, and hatred of Indians—before he arrived on the Tennessee frontier. Biographer John Spencer Bassett remarked that Jackson’s “ideals were absorbed from the frontier environment . . . He voiced the best thought of the frontier . . . His Western ideals were for him the only ideals.” Frederick A. Ogg called him “the untrained, self-willed, passionate frontier soldier.” Historian Thomas P. Abernethy concluded that gambling, not a desire to emulate the elite society that he had witnessed in the Carolinas, led Jackson to “play the part” of a gentleman upon his arrival in East Tennessee. John William Ward’s analysis of Jackson’s symbolic significance centered on his western identity, while Arthur Schlesinger Jr. failed to address his background at all. Richard B. Latner, whose study of Jackson’s presidency explicitly linked Old Hickory to the West, acknowledged that “one would be hard-pressed . . . to fit slaveholding, tough-minded politicians like Jackson . . . into Turner’s conception of western democratic idealism,” yet he failed to elucidate from where Old Hickory’s views on slavery originated and how they influenced his political decisions. [2]

More recent scholarship has also failed to explain how Jackson assumed the characteristics of the southern gentry. Lorman Ratner’s compendium of short biographical sketches of Jackson and his closest allies offered a promising argument that the Tennessean emulated a Scottish thane, or clan leader, as he entered the gentry, but his analysis was brief and superficial. Along similar lines Andrew Burstein’s study of Jackson’s passions also centered on his relationship with the men with whom he surrounded himself, but his analysis was informed by literary theory and did not concern itself with southern cultural practices such as kinship and slaveholding. Likewise, Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Jackson as president failed to place Old Hickory’s outsized character in a social context that made him understandable. The two most recent surveys of the Jacksonian period fell into the same pattern of skimming over Jackson’s transformation into a southern planter. Sean Wilentz’s mammoth survey of

American democracy in the early republic paid scant attention to Jackson’s slaveholding and land speculation, both of which marked his entry into the planter class. While recognizing the importance of slavery to Jacksonian Democrats, Daniel Walker Howe’s equally behemoth examination of the Jacksonian period treated Jackson’s southern identity with similar brevity. [3]

There have been notable exceptions to the above trend. Robert Remini’s three-volume biography discussed extensively Jackson’s various business dealings, including land speculation and slaveholding, but that information was secondary to the frontier’s influence on Old Hickory. William J. Cooper Jr. clearly elucidated Jackson’s importance to southern politics, while Bertram Wyatt-Brown brilliantly explained his embodiment of southern honor. More recently, Bettina Drew’s unpublished dissertation examined “Master Andrew Jackson” and the influence of his southern identity on his removal of the southeastern Indians, Matthew Warshauer offered an overview of Jackson as a chivalric slave owner, and Hendrik Booraem’s study of Jackson’s early life made a convincing case that he had been exposed to, and influenced by, the southern gentry in the Carolinas. [4]

Although most scholars describe Old Hickory as a westerner, as representative of the trans-Appalachian frontier, Jackson was truly a southerner. He was born and raised in the Waxhaws region of the most southern of states, South Carolina, where he learned that the path to success included building an influential social network, choosing a career in law, and acquiring land and slave property. In Tennessee, Jackson worked toward becoming a southern planter and gentleman, although his enemies would have disputed the latter. His desire to live as part of the gentry was ever present, even as he defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815, ascended to the presidency in 1828, and built the Democratic party in the 1830s and 1840s. Jackson’s propensity toward violence, defense of honor, enslavement of African Americans, embrace of kinship, and pursuit of Manifest Destiny created a southern identity to which many contemporary white southerners, elite and nonelite, could relate. One of the greatest ironies of Jackson’s life was that his identification with the South laid the foundation for the Civil War. Even though the idea of Indian removal preceded him, his actions as general and president accelerated the process, opening up southeastern lands to white settlers intent on making money from cotton. Jackson opposed disunion in 1832 and 1833, yet his longtime pursuit and support of Manifest Destiny helped drive a wedge between northerners and southerners and exacerbated the slavery debate. He supported the annexation of Texas, which, when accomplished, set off a chain of events that made slavery the crucial issue in the congressional debates over westward expansion and led to the nation’s division.

Although Jackson died without witnessing the bloody conflict that began in 1861, his influence as the “patriot slaveholder” was obvious during the secession crisis of 1860–1861. Both northerners and southerners appealed to his example to make the case for and against secession. Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address drew on Jackson’s 1832 Nullification Proclamation, which denied South Carolina’s right to nullify federal law and dismember the Union, to argue that “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” In the end Old Hickory not only helped create the South that precipitated the nation’s greatest crisis, but he also provided the model for Lincoln’s opposition to the Confederacy’s formation. [5]

1. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; repr., New York: Dover, 1996), 252–253. Turner and his disciples seem to have embraced the characterization of Jackson that emerged from the War of 1812, which allowed “supposedly uncivilized [backcountry] settlers . . . [to be] transformed into hardy, courageous American frontiersmen” (Matthew Rainbow Hale, in “Interchange: The War of 1812,” JAH 99 [September 2012]: 527).

2. John Spencer Bassett, The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Macmillan, 1911), xii; Frederic A. Ogg, The Reign of Andrew Jackson: A Chronicle of the Frontier in Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), 114; Thomas P. Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (1932; repr., Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1967), 123–124; John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945); Richard B. Latner, The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 5.

Working with the page proofs of your book is a daunting task. As your publisher will tell you, the only possible changes are editorial, factual or typesetter errors. So, that sentence that doesn’t quite read right? You’re stuck with it. The additional research that came to light after you submitted the copy-edited drafts? Write it up in a journal article.

Despite not being able to significantly change the book at this point, paying close attention to the page proofs is important. There will always be mistakes that need correcting, and it’s your final chance to catch them and ask for them to be addressed.

LSU Press sent me a checklist that seems pretty standard from my experience:

Make sure chapter titles in the table of contents and the runningheads are correct.

Verify that the endnote numbers in the text match up with the endnotes section at the back of the book.

Check the page numbers in the table of contents and supply the page numbers for the runningheads in the endnotes section.

Read the text carefully for the three types of errors that can be corrected.

Understand that your published book will still have errors in it. Old Hickory’s Nephew has two obvious ones that I pointed out on the page proofs, yet they still made it into the final product. It’s unfortunate, but human errors happen.

You might find this thread on the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Research Questions forum helpful as well. It even discusses indexing, the topic of my next post.

Note: As the publication date of Andrew Jackson, Southerner approaches, this series is also nearing its end. I plan on writing 2-3 more posts following this one.

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I’ll bet I paid a lot less than Subway did for product placement in this episode.

I want to thank the hit ABC show Nashville for using the cover of Andrew Jackson, Southerner as a prop in the mayor’s office. It would be better if someone on the show were actually reading the book, but I’ll take it.

(Of course, that portrait just happens to be the same one I’m using for my book cover, but one can dream.)

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Amazon.com has Andrew Jackson, Southerner listed at a pre-sale price of 29.80. That’s 25% off of the list price of $39.95. I also plan to hold a contest of some sort to give away a handful of signed copies this fall.

Many Americans view Andrew Jackson as a frontiersman who fought duels, killed Indians, and stole another man’s wife. Historians have traditionally presented Jackson as a man who struggled to overcome obstacles and helped create a more democratic United States. In his compelling new biography of Jackson, Mark R. Cheathem argues for a reassessment of these long-held views, suggesting that in fact “Old Hickory” lived as an elite southern gentleman.

Jackson grew up along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, a district tied to Charleston, where the city’s gentry engaged in the transatlantic marketplace. After visiting Charleston, Jackson moved to North Carolina, where he joined various political and kinship networks that provided him with entrée into society. In fact, Cheathem contends, Jackson had already started to assume the characteristics of a southern gentleman by the time he arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1788.

After moving to Nashville, Jackson further ensconced himself in an exclusive social order by marrying the daughter of one of the city’s cofounders, engaging in land speculation, and leading the state militia. According to Cheathem, through these ventures Jackson grew to own multiple plantations and cultivated them with the labor of almost two hundred slaves. His status also enabled him to build a military career focused on eradicating the nation’s enemies, including Indians residing on land desired by white southerners. Jackson’s military success eventually propelled him onto the national political stage in the 1820s, where he won two terms as president. Jackson’s years as chief executive demonstrated the complexity of the system of elite white southern men, as he earned the approval of many white southerners by continuing to pursue Manifest Destiny and opposing the spread of abolitionism, yet earned their ire because of his efforts to fight nullification and the Second Bank of the United States.

By emphasizing Jackson’s southern identity, characterized by violence, honor, kinship, slavery, and Manifest Destiny, Cheathem’s narrative offers a bold new perspective on one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned and controversial presidents.

The cloth (hardback) edition will be published in October and will retail for $39.95, and an e-book edition, almost certainly priced lower, will be available as well.

On the surface, it looks like a strange list, but I have fond memories of each of these books. When I was a child, my parents bought me a set of books that included all of the above except Pilgrim’s Progress, and I read them multiple times. Bunyan’s book was a required school reading, but I also read it for fun. (Please withhold your groans.)

I’m interested to see how well my memories of them hold up with rereading. If you’re interested in last summer’s reading list, it’s posted here.

Mary Beard recently explained how her most recent book cover design evolved. My experiences have been a little bit different. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great designers at LSU Press. Amanda McDonald Scallon designed the cover of Old Hickory’s Nephew (OHN), which I think brilliantly captured how Jackson haunted Donelson for his entire life. I gave no input about how the cover should be designed. For the Andrew Jackson, Southerner cover, I suggested the portrait that graces the front but gave no other direction.

For the most part, academic publishers want to be left alone when it comes to design. They have marketing specialists who know what they’re doing when it comes to creating a book cover that will sell. It behooves authors to remember that fact. At the same time, my impression and experience is that it’s okay to indicate preferences for things. For example, with OHN, I told LSU Press that I didn’t like a certain bland book design that I had seen on their books. This time around, I suggested the portrait that they decided to use, but I understood that it was only a preference and that their designer had the final approval on whether to use it.

One other important thing to remember: If you want to use a certain image on the book jacket, understand that the image owner will not only have to grant you permission but will also likely require a rights fee or some other kind of compensation. Thankfully, The Hermitage owns the Jackson portrait for the forthcoming biography, and they were willing to allow its use (as they did for those on the OHN cover) for reasonable compensation.

You might be asking why I’m talking about the doldrums that set in following submission of the manuscript now instead of after its publication. From my experience, the real emotional letdown occurs once the manuscript is submitted to the editor for copy-editing. There is nothing yet tangible to point out to family and friends or to include in annual faculty activity reports.

I don’t know how others deal with this emotional gap, but here are a few things that I’ve done.

I organize research. If you’re like me, the final weeks prior to submission were not only spent cleaning up prose but also verifying footnotes. I had stacks of research folders on my desk, so I spent parts of several days refiling them, if I thought they would useful in the future, or scanning them into .pdfs if I wanted to keep them but didn’t think they were going to be important to future projects.

I started working on the index. Call me crazy (or call me maybe–that’s my favorite joke right now), but I got a jump on indexing the manuscript. Obviously, page numbers will have to come later, but I had a list of proper names and concepts that I wanted to include, so I organized them. I’m sure I’ll modify the index when the page proofs come in, but at least I’ve saved some time.

I started work on other projects. Like many of you, I have a main project (or two) and other minor projects. I was able to spend time on a couple of articles that were in various stages of completion, worked on book proposals for publishers, and wrote a conference paper.

I took some time to relax. This is an important one that I sometimes forget exists. I read popular fiction, spent time with family, and helped with home-improvement projects. The last one wasn’t so relaxing, but YMMV.

The bottom line: Stay active in some way, whether mentally or physically. That’s good advice to follow all of the time, but I think academic writers, who can become obsessive, need reminding sometimes.